MOOCs: Over already? [Commentary]

By James Grimmelmann. The massive open online courses have so far failed to deliver on all of their over-inflated promises. In the summer of 2011, Sebastian Thrun lit a fire under colleges around the world. The Stanford professor and a colleague filmed themselves lecturing for their course on artificial intelligence and put the videos online so that anyone could join. Roughly 160,000 students from around the world took them up on the offer. And even Stanford students found the videos more compelling than going to the class itself. The runaway success of the "Stanford AI Course" touched off a wave of excitement over Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). They offer a model for delivering classes online to any person who wants to enroll, with no limit on attendance. Read more...